


He [Precariously] Handles it

by gingertoadstools



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-01
Updated: 2013-04-01
Packaged: 2017-12-07 03:20:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/743591
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gingertoadstools/pseuds/gingertoadstools
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He’s disgusting.</p>
<p>	That’s alright. He can handle that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	He [Precariously] Handles it

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sorry if I tagged incorrectly. I'm not sure how exactly AO3 handles what tags should be used. A friend informed me to just tag everyone mentioned, so. Sorry if I did it wrong. I haven't used AO3 before.
> 
> So, bs introspective thing about Equius. Hope you like it.

He’s disgusting.

That’s alright. He can handle that.

He doesn’t understand what makes him disgusting exactly, and that’s a curiosity he’s still not managed to sate. He wishes he could pry his fingers (gently, oh goodness, _gently_ ) into their minds and extract that particular thought process, just to analyze the way it came about.

Sometimes Nepeta tells him it’s because he’s sweaty. He knows that is a legitimately gross thing to a lot of people. Even he thinks it’s pretty unsanitary and wishes he didn’t have such an excess of it at all times. His confusion on this theory is how exactly people get that from him over their internet conversations, though. They can’t see how much he perspires through their screens, they can’t sit in his unhelpfully damp computer chair, he’s made the point recently of trying not to mention every time he leaves to get a towel, just to not make his issue seem so obvious.

Yet the opinion is unanimous. He’s “disgusting”.

His neighbor, the brutal backstabber she is, tells him it’s because he’s “creepy”, but this adjective falls into the same question as “disgusting”. What makes him creepy? Vriska sometimes mentions off handedly some of her reasons for thinking so. The masterpieces coating his walls, she cites, are often considered the worst, but he honest to goodness doesn’t understand that. They were beautifully done paintings that he felt attracted toward for their mastery of art and anatomy and just a general love of the topic about which they’ve been painted.

They were very expensive, he spent enough of his government-given blueblood allowance on each one that he had to cut down on robotic parts for the perigee, and it’s really honestly abhorrent that they are apparently a signal for other, less cultured individuals, to turn heel and leave. 

Everyone always mutters when they’re leaving. He doesn’t think they realize he notices it. They mutter rude, disgusting, insulting things when they don’t think he’s listening. Like he just disappears when they aren’t actively looking at him, they just quietly say distasteful things.

He never responds. It’d be rude, childish, even brutish of him to get angry over it. (Not to say he hasn’t gotten angry over it. A lot. A whole lot. He’s mad so often that he thinks it might actually be a problem.) He’s never hit them for a couple insolent comments thrown his way, he’s never snapped a neck for something so petty.

But he still doesn’t understand why they have to mutter about him like that, or why he’s creepy, or why he’s gross.

He tries his hardest, and his hardest is very hard indeed, to be the least dissolute he can. He doesn’t even swear, unlike so many of his slightly-vile peers. He tries to keep his composure, and he doesn’t destroy things on purpose all the time.

On the few occasions he manages to speak to Aradia, she tells a different story about his “abs0lute lack 0f anything resembling likeability.” When he was younger and more likely to cast his woes on anyone around, he’d once nearly begged her to explain after every other friend fell through, probably muttering about his messages.

She told him that he saw her as maroon. He agreed, and he thought he nearly heard her yell from her shack of a hive. She nearly screamed that that’s the point, the problem. He didn’t understand.

She then asked, when you look at Nepeta what do you see? And he said, my lovely olive-blooded friend. Then she asked, at what point do you think about the fact she’s olive-blooded?

He thinks she wasn’t very happy when he said that he thinks of her as his lovely _olive-blooded_ friend. She stopped talking to him in that conversation and it was hard convincing himself not to cry at the time because nobody else was going to shush him quiet or calm him down, and crying’s such a waste of body water and such a loss of self-control. He did manage to reel in the urge to cry that time, tears building and throat scratchy with the ball that chokes crying lonely boys.

He asked again, a sweep later, Nepeta asleep in his recuperacoon while insomnia hammered at his brow, sending ripples of a headache through his head. Why did she dislike him so much at least?

She was online at the time, and it was a bit odd that they should have both been so unable to sleep.

In her disgusting maroon shade of wording, she typed “because y0u see me as a mar00n and n0thing m0re”

Then, “y0ur castism is a disgrace t0 th0se bluebl00ds that d0n’t have rainb0w painted sticks in every 0rifice.”

He did not attempt to argue the point, as her viewpoint could never possibly understand. He was a blueblood. Not someone common, but a blueblood with rights and expectations.

He was a successful troll because he knew those rights and expectations come in balancing scales, although he didn’t think lowbloods realized it. Being in such a high caste is an honor, and one he was more than willing to embrace, because everyone else does and nobody’s knife hesitates at the sight of your back. He never understood the victimizing they thought they had right to. He knew what highbloods did, what they had to be capable of. His intimate knowledge of his position was the problem in her eyes?

Is it why they all think he’s disgusting? Because he knows his place and intends to stick to it like a proper highblood?

It couldn’t possibly be.

He’s simply proper.

Meeting your caste expectations is not a crime. It never will be.

He can endure the mutters if it does not endanger his views.

_“So fucking gross”_

_“Such a creep”_

_“Why do I have to know this guy?”_

_“Ugh.”_

That’s alright. He can handle that much.


End file.
